CERN traps antimatter atoms for 1,000 seconds

http://www.gizmag.com/cern-traps-an...aign=dfca59b3b2-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

antimatter was always for me like theoretical things like dinosaurs' extinction or the big bang, things we have evidence for but can't really see or interact with directly, like phantom things which don't exist for themselves but they're there to fill a pattern..
..now they trapped them for MINUTES!? not the usual pico and vimto second stuff, how the hell is this all of a sudden possible?

will we have antimatter bombs next?

 

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Antimatter was first predicted in the 1920's by Paul Dirac as a consequence of combining Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and it was physically detected shortly afterwards by sending a high-altitude balloon to observe the tracks created by cosmic ray positrons passing through photographic film. They've been making it and playing with it in the lab for decades.

You keep it going around and around inside a magnetic field or trap it inside an electric field until you're ready to use it.

CERN already has an answer to your question: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html

 

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I always say never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

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I know bullshit when I see it. Billion years my ass, does CERN expect the human species to quit advancing. But I don't blame them for trying to defuse a possible public relations problem, which could lead to funding problems.

 

I'm pretty certain they're just talking about their own collider and similar technologies. Trillions of dollars of electrical power could be spent running the system, and the explosive power of the antimatter it would produce and store is less than the power of a $100 homemade bomb.

If you want to talk about cutting-edge doomsday bombs, on the other hand... In principle you can make H-bombs much, much bigger and more powerful than anything that's been built to date. Even the Russians' Tsar Bomba, the most powerful bomb in history, was deliberately limited from exploding with full power, in order to not wipe out the cargo plane that dropped it. Who says you have to make an H-bomb small enough to fit on a plane or a rocket? You could just build one the size of the Pentagon and I'll bet that would wipe out most of life as we know it, and you only need rare fissile materials for the innermost core, the outer layers can be made from abundant elements like hydrogen and depleted/unenriched uranium.

 

I'm sure you are correct, but small is better and will do wonders for space travel and anything as big as the Pentagon wouldn't be very useable as a weapon. Anyway anti matter isn't much different than other big discoveries in that it can be used for both good and evil. Also given that the tech required to handle it wouldn't be cheap or easy to acquire, I don't think we would have to worry about terrorist getting their hands on any of it.

 

Firstly, we're lightyears away from using H-bombs as a form of propulsion. We don't even have viable fusion power yet. Nor is any superpower conceiving of building a Pentagon-sized H-bomb, and no terrorist is close to getting an H-bomb of any size whatsoever. Secondly, antimatter has almost no conceivable practical applications, period, neither good nor evil. It's not like Star Trek, things are very different in the labs of the real world, it's not like you can just make lakes full of the stuff with a few technology improvements here or there, rather you would need to rewrite the laws of physics altogether. The only practical application I can think of for antimatter is to use it in some sort of scanning application, where you bounce a few particles off a target and check for how it interacts with some of the atoms in that target.

 

Long way to go, maybe and maybe not. Technology is advancing faster than I ever believed it would and it seems to be accelerating, so there is no telling when a new break through might happen. I'm thinking anything in the next 100 years as fairly near term. As far as the laws of physics go we still have a ways to go before we really understand them like we should, so maybe they will be added to in refinements and depth of understanding which I guess is a form of rewrite.

 

in a nutshell, antimatter particle+matter particle= nothing, zero, right?

when the big bang happened, nothingness split into matter and anti matter, right? for mass conservation to still apply to the universe..?

and cptbork, thanks for all the explanation, though, stupid question; why exactly 1000second? why not 17 minutes flat? or would that like cause a black out in half the united states?

and i agree with killjoyclown, estimations to the arrival of technologies is limited by todays technologies, the approximation is linear. when new technologies are discovered the approximations are changed, and what's supposed to come in a millennia will come in years.

 

Technology had been advancing very quickly. Many things that used to be science fiction are now possible or even is made already

P.S. Is this thread the same as another thread somewhere around here, which also mentioned cern trapped antimatter for 1000 seconds?

 

Just look at these letters from 1945.

Dear Mr scientist,
my Daddy says that nuclears will be making bomds soon because eynstine says so. Is that tru? Mummy says to right to you becas you are clever.
Signed Jimmy Splogetski, Kansas, Aged 8

Dear Jimmy.
Your father couldn't be more wrong. A bomb would be impossible to make because of the amount of nuclear material required.
Be a good boy at school and maybe you will be a scientist one day.
Yours, J Robert Oppenheimer

 

On a psuedo-related note... And I must start this by saying I have not seen any further information on the topic I am basing this on, so it may have been discredited already.....

A while (few months back) on this forum I think (I hang out at a few science forums... ) I recall a link to a post about a practical device performing the Maxwell's Demon experiment.

IF the device were actually able to work, and do what it says with no energy input (This is the part that may be discredited....I haven't seen anything further on it as I said.) I was thinking at the time that it might be possible to modify the experiment to instead of separating molecules by momentum, rather to trap virtual particles as they come into existence. At least potentially, of course the first test would have to be verified anyway.

 

Not true at all. Antimatter is like normal matter but with opposite electric charge, and other quantum properties like parity are also reversed. When you combine normal matter and antimatter particles of the same type, they will tend to annihilate each other into pure energy, which then gets converted to particles of some other type (or even conversion back to the original particles, as if they just bounced off each other instead of annihilating).

No one knows how the universe came to exist or how mass first appeared in it, at least not from a scientific POV. The common wisdom is that matter and antimatter should have begun in roughly equal amounts, and over time slight differences between the two types of matter meant that antimatter decayed into matter faster than than the reverse, so the universe we see today is mostly made of regular matter. Note an important point here- antimatter can be converted into regular matter and vice-versa, as long as things like total electric charge are still conserved.

Well the experiment is in Switzerland, so the US wouldn't have to worry about blackouts. I'm sure they just chose 1000 seconds because it's a nice round number, maybe in reality they went for 1051 seconds but just counted the first 1000. There are probably challenges with trapping the anti-hydrogen atoms for longer time periods, because these atoms most likely slowly leak out over time, so you'd have to keep replacing them with more anti-hydrogen atoms, defeating the purpose of trapping them and studying them in the first place. And no, the amount of antimatter they produce at CERN is so small, I don't think there's any danger if it leaks. You're being bombarded by particles of atmospheric antimatter all the time, but the number of particles hitting you is just too small to have a noticeable effect without studying it on an atomic level.

It can work the other way too- what might seem possible in a few years might end up taking millenia, or never become possible at all. We certainly don't seem much closer to flying antigravity cars than we were 60 years ago (aircraft made to look like cars don't count). No one lives on the moon yet. I don't see emotional, thinking robots running around doing all the dirty work for us, that was another thing people expected us to have by now. For antimatter to have a practical use on industrial scales, like I said we'll need to discover some major shortcoming in our present understanding of physics, and no one can say whether that will ever be found, nor when.

Virtual particles don't come into existence in a way that they can be trapped- by definition, they can only be detected by the effects of their interactions with real particles. If you could trap a virtual particle, you would have a particle in your trap with some very unphysical properties, such as imaginary mass (i.e. the squared mass is negative).

 

When that energy which is created because of encounters between matter and antimatter, turns back into matter, does it turn back into matter and antimatter equally.

Normal energy is in equilibrium with normal matter isn't it?
Depending upon conditions.

Or is there energy and anti-energy?
Converting into their counterparts.

 

This is why I should stick to chemistry... LOL, the way I thought it might work is that real particle pairs also could pop into existance though only for a very short time before returning to the quantum stew.

 

In general yes, but that doesn't always have to happen. It's possible for a particle of matter to decay into antimatter, and vice-versa, and the universe does in fact have a slight preference for things to become normal matter. An example would be the oscillations of neutral B-mesons; they're known to flip back and forth between matter and antimatter. Another important thing to note is that not all interactions between matter and antimatter involve annihilation- you could, for instance, take a positron (anti-electron) and collide it with a regular neutron to produce a proton plus some residual junk.

Energy is different, there's no such thing as normal vs. anti-energy (the concept of negative/dark energy is something totally different). If you have a bunch of energy, i.e. an accelerated particle travelling near lightspeed with lots of kinetic energy, you can slam that particle into something and cause that kinetic energy to be converted into more particles. When you do that, the particles you produce will tend to have an equal balance between matter and antimatter, but I'm just saying that's not absolutely 100% necessary every time.

As far as I understand it, and based on what various profs have said to me when I've raised the topic in the past, we don't really know whether virtual particles actually exist, or whether the math just works out in such a way that it appears as if they exist. The most interesting experimental consequence for virtual particles is: suppose I come up with some new theory to explain some phenomenon, by taking the Standard Model and adding a couple more particles. Those particles, if they exist, would have a mathematical effect on everything nature does, which is what we would call the "virtual particle" effect, "quantum loop corrections" etc. So if your experiment is sufficiently precise, you can produce evidence that such undiscovered particles actually exist, by showing that your calculations produce a more accurate result when the effects of these particles are taken into account.

 

I should add that the reason producing antimatter on large scales isn't practical, is because you still have to deal with the same old entropy problems. Just like heat tends to flow from hot things to cold things with almost 100% universal consistency (there's always an astronomically small probability for heat to flow the other way), you can't just order up antimatter from nature at will like a pizza delivery. Every known process for producing antimatter ends up only producing tiny amounts, with nearly all the input energy basically going to waste and producing secondary crap you're probably not interested in producing. And where are you gonna get the input energy? You wouldn't get it from combining matter with antimatter, because that's just a major waste of the antimatter that already exists.

 

Thanks.

On the WAVE/PARTICLE dichotomy.
Are elementary particles measured as waves more like energy than those particles measured as particles?

Particles seem more solid, intuitively.
And energy seems a diffuse quality, like waves.

 

Like CptBork said, no. I suppose you saw the atrocious feature on News at Ten the other night. Talk about bad science and hype. Antimatter really isn't such a big deal. It was discovered in 1932. We use it to take pictures in a PET scan.

 

I think the whole idea of a "measurement" is that a wave representing many possibilities collapses down to a particle representing only one possibility (or a squashed down wave representing only a few possibilities). Because of the various uncertainty principles, we can never pin down the exact properties of a particle (such as position), hence it always has at least some wavelike behaviour even in the most precise of experiments.

In modern, relativistic quantum mechanics, all particles can basically be viewed as packets of energy, but these energy packets can have properties like charge and spin, and some of them have a rest mass, while others don't (i.e. photons). Relativity basically kills the distinction between matter and energy.